


(three) sixty-five

by thepensword



Series: de la lune [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Gen, cycle 65, lucretia alone on the judge's world, numerous ocs sorry not sorry i am not writing an entire year with no characters, this is not a happy story, warnings included at the start of every chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-06-08 07:22:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15238326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepensword/pseuds/thepensword
Summary: Lucretia has always been lonely. But for these past years, for all that they suffer, she has found a family, and she has been happy.Then they reach the sixty-fifth cycle, and Lucretia learns what it is to be truly alone.





	1. prelude

**Author's Note:**

> hello hello welcome to my new multi-chapter fic of lucretia angst bc apparently that's all i'm capable of writing. i hope you're ready to be sad.
> 
> Warnings: non-graphic descriptions of injury, blood mention, offscreen character death, brief description of a panic attack, imagery associated with a crashing vehicle. it's the starblaster, but if you're sensitive to, say, descriptions of car crashes, be careful. 
> 
> chapters after this one will probably be longer. i think.

“Alright,” says Davenport. “Things look pretty calm here, but be on the lookout just in case.”

The world below them is barren and empty. The trees stretch black fingers towards the sky and the only visible civilization takes the form of a few skeletal villages, dark smoke curling upwards from between patchwork shelters cast in the miniature by the Starblaster’s altitude.

“Calm, yeah,” says Magnus dubiously, and Lucretia shifts closer to him on instinct. She’s learned over the years to trust his gut feelings; if he does not like this situation, it’s best to be on the alert. “But not exactly...friendly.”

Lucretia opens her mouth to agree, but then the city comes into view, white spires reaching towards the sky, beautiful and intimidating.

Several things happen at once.

There is blinding light and roaring sound and the air fills with the stench of smoke and charred metal. Screams fill the air and Lucretia channels all of her magic into her hands and pushes outwards, casting her strongest and largest shield.

She’s not fast enough.

“ _No!”_ she screams, and it is so distant that it takes her a moment to register that it is her screaming. The others are falling away from her and her shield is expanding far too slowly and the earth is rapidly approaching and then—

Darkness.

 

* * *

 

 

Lucretia awakens to white noise in her ears and thick, poisonous dread in her veins.

She blinks her eyes open slowly, and winces at the cold brightness of the sky. Jagged metal surrounds her on all sides, and the wind blows past in a course rush of not-quite silence. The air, where it rests on her tongue, tastes like bones and despair.

“Magnus,” says Lucretia, remembering the look on his face before the world had splintered, the way her hand had reached for his and missed. The name escapes her in a dry rasp of sound that quickly devolves into coughing and Lucretia rolls over onto her stomach, gasping for air. The movement incites a sharp burst of pain in her chest and she whines lowly, curling up tight and trying very carefully to breathe.

“Magnus,” wheezes Lucretia. “Taako. Lup.”

She tastes blood on her tongue and salt on her lips. The blood is from the coughing; the salt is from the tears that are now rolling down her face at the realization that no one is answering, that she is utterly alone.

She wants to crumple. She wants to stay here in the battered wreckage of the Starblaster, curled painfully on the ground with an aching and frightened heart, waiting for someone to save her—but that is not an option. She does not know where the others are, or even if they’re still alive, and if they’re _not_ —well. If they’re dead, then it’s even more important that she pull herself up, so that she can have them back at the end of the year.

She hopes they’re not dead, even though the sick feeling in her stomach and the hollow cavity in her heart indicate otherwise. Death is temporary for them, as long as one escapes—but it can be very lonely to be that one.

There has never been a cycle where only one survived alone. There have been times that came close, or times when all but one died in the last moments, the brief-yet-vicious fight against the approaching Hunger, but never have they all died so soon.

Lucretia needs them to be alive. She is not the strongest, or the smartest, or the bravest. She is just Lucretia, perpetually eighteen, absorbed in her writings so she does not have to remember the world she has lost, so she does not have to ponder the complicated emotions surrounding the loss of her parents.

The crew of the Starblaster is her family now, in so many wonderful, impossible ways. They care for each other immensely, and they protect each other with reckless ferocity. They hold her up and shelter her and do not mind if she forgets to say please and thank you. Around them, Lucretia forgets to be afraid, because around them, she knows everything will be alright. Ironically, despite being constantly on the run from a reality-devouring entity, Lucretia has never felt safer than she has onboard the Starblaster.

She wants them to be alive. She needs them to be alive. Because she is not strong or brave or bold. Because she is just quiet, bookish Lucretia. Because she is injured and afraid and unsure what to do.

Because a year is an awfully long time to be alone.

Lucretia braces her hands beneath her shoulders and pushes upwards. The movement sends pain lancing through her and she coughs up more blood; she thinks she might have punctured a lung, which means if she can’t get herself to a healer _now_ , she could very well end up dead and that is unacceptable. (If she dies, so do the others, and the Hunger will have won.) She holds herself there for a moment, arms trembling, and then collapses again.

“I can’t,” gasps Lucretia. She is talking to everyone and to no one, to herself and to her absent crew. She wishes so desperately for an answer. “I can’t...I can’t do it, I can’t, I can’t…”

But she has to. The others are depending on her. She _has_ to.

So Lucretia tries again, and pushes through the pain and the tightness in her chest and the blood bubbling at her lips, and somehow, somehow manages to stand.

She slumps against the wall and closes her eyes. She’s shaking violently, from pain and exertion and fear and grief, but she has to keep going. She has to find a healer. She has to live.

There’s a gaping hole in the wall opposite, so Lucretia stumbles across the room towards it, using the assorted furniture to keep from falling over. She finds a spare hat of Taako’s lying on the seat of an armchair and impusively grabs it, shoving it firmly onto her head over dirty and blood-smeared hair. _Taako won’t be happy about the grime,_ she thinks, and then she remembers that it will be clean again next she sees him, when he’s back from being dead.

 _If he died,_ she reminds herself, because she cannot admit defeat. She has to cling to the desperate hope that maybe she is not alone. _Maybe he’s still alive. Maybe they’re all still alive. Maybe…_

She trips as she clambers out of the jagged hole and falls five feet to the ground, landing with a thud and jostling her ribs hard enough that she cannot breathe for a full thirty seconds. As she coughs up blood and struggles for air, Lucretia looks up at the clear gray sky and thinks, _maybe this is where it ends. Sixty-five years of running and all for naught, all because I wasn’t strong enough._

 **Strength comes from the inside, Lucretia,** says Magnus into her ear, and Lucretia squeezes back her tears and nods. He’s right; how could she forget? If Magnus believes she can be strong, then she can be. For him. For all of them. For her family, Lucretia can find her strength.

She pushes herself up using the outside wall of the Starblaster and moves forward. She makes it three steps before something inside her gives and then she’s doubled over coughing and then she’s collapsing and then everything once again fades away.

“I’m sorry,” whispers Lucretia as she falls.

 

* * *

 

 

This time, Lucretia awakens somewhere unfamiliar. The blankets beneath her are rough, the air filled with the scent of woodsmoke and tobacco. Her lip curls reflexively and as she tries to breathe through her mouth instead of her nose, heavy coughing racks her chest, bringing fresh blood to her tongue.

“Oh, good,” says an unfamiliar voice that is as course and grating as sandpaper. “You’re awake.”

There are footsteps nearby and Lucretia forces her eyes open and attempts to sit up. She gasps at the movement and freezes in place, hand going to her chest. She is definitely still injured, definitely still in critical condition, but she thinks maybe she’s a bit closer to stable than before. That means someone must have healed her, but whoever it was did a poor job of it. Whether that was intentional or not, she can’t be sure yet, so she knows to be on guard.

She opens her eyes and lifts her head. She’s lying on the floor, on a pile of old blankets, and crouched beside her is an old half-elf with dirt on his face and eyes like charcoal. He watches her intently with no kindness to his expression.

“Who—” says Lucretia, and then breaks off coughing. God, she wishes she could stop coughing. It’s so _painful_. If Merle were here, he could fix her up quickly, and he’d give her a candy of dubious origins and an inappropriate anecdote with a twinkle in his eyes. If Merle was here, if the others were here, if they hadn’t—

Merle isn’t here. It’s just Lucretia, and this strange man. She has to look out for herself.

“Who are you?” she asks, even though it hurts. “Where am I?”

The man regards her for a moment, expression frozen in a sort of thoughtful grimace. “You’re in my home,” he says at last. “My name is Logan Britovius. I’m a healer. I found you passed out in the woods near that strange contraption of yours. And hate to say it, girly, but you’re in pretty bad shape.”

Lucretia hears the word _healer_ and basically tunes out everything else. If she’s with a healer, maybe she can get better quickly enough to find her friends, maybe she can stop _hurting—_

But why hasn’t he healed her yet?

She says this last bit out loud. Logan pauses, and looks at her, and then smiles a small, cold smile that sends shivers down her spine. It’s not a friendly smile.

“I stabilized you,” says Logan. “You’re not going to die immediately. But you’re not going anywhere anytime soon, either. You don’t have to worry about that, though; stabilizing you is a low-effort spell, so just consider it a gift. But for more than that…”

Lucretia just stares at him, uncomprehending. Distantly, she thinks she understands what he’s getting at, but the thought of it sends such ice through her veins that she shoves it away and pretends not to understand.

“What?”

Logan sighs. “You can’t get something for nothing, girly. Nothing comes without a price in this world.”

Lucretia blinks. “A price?”

“You got any coin?”

She doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. Each new world brings a new currency and only occasionally does that currency look familiar. Each cycle begins with someone (usually Magnus) getting a job and someone else (usually Lup) trying to swindle money away from the natives. Eventually, once they’d found a sufficient amount, Taako would transmute their old currency into the new one and they’d be set.

But not this time. There is no Magnus to take odd jobs or Lup to cheat at poker or Taako to turn gold into rubies. There’s just Lucretia, mortally wounded and penniless, staring into the face of a man who can save her but will not.

Lucretia’s lips form the word _please_ but no sound comes out. Logan is watching her and her body is wracked with pain and her family is depending on her and she can do nothing at all to save herself, to save them, and all because she doesn’t have any _fucking_ money.

The air catches in her already battered throat and she chokes. Her lungs are collapsing inwards, her chest tight like curled fists—she’s dying, she’s sure in this moment that she’s dying, that the stabilizing spell has worn off, that everything will come to nothing because she’s too damn weak and oh, _god, it hurts_ —

Rough hands rub her back. “Hey, now,” says Logan, and his voice is friendly, as if he does not hold her life in his hands. “Deep breaths, now. So you don’t have coin, I’m guessing. That’s alright. How about I cut you a deal?”

The noise that escapes Lucretia’s mouth is desperate. She’ll do just about anything at this point if it means the pain will go away.

“Work for me,” says Logan. “Nothing major, just odd jobs around the house and in the yard. Like hired help, but instead of getting paid you’d be working to pay off a debt of your own. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? A few months of work—a year or two at the absolute most—in exchange for your life?”

There is a part of Lucretia’s mind that screams not to tie herself into someone else’s control, not on this unforgiving world, not ever. She spent a childhood under her mother’s control. She knows better than to relinquish her freedom. And she’s not stupid—she knows the dangers of indentured servitude, knows it’s basically slavery—but she is also afraid and in pain and desperately alone.

It’s just a year. It’s just a year and it all resets and she’ll have her family back. She just has to survive that long.

Lucretia tastes dried blood on her tongue and knows in that moment that she does not really have a choice. Logan watches her with eyes black as beetle wings and smiles falsely and she can see in the canyons of his expression that he knows he has her caught.

“Alright,” says Lucretia, and her voice is as faint as candle-smoke.

Logan’s smile spreads. His hand splays wide on her back and heat gathers in his palm, and then Lucretia is healed. The pain recedes; her breathing eases.

She should be relieved. Most people, when saved from near-death, would be relieved.

But she looks into Logan’s eyes and feels nothing but dread.

“Well,” says Logan brightly. “That’s that, then. Feel better?”

She nods. She cannot speak, tongue still too thick with emotions. Logan accepts this without comment, thank the gods, and then clambers to his feet, brushing straw from his trousers as he does so. He crosses to a rickety table and picks up a pitcher of water before bringing it back over and holding it out for her to take. She does so, sipping warily, and hates herself for how good it makes her feel as it slips down her parchment-dry throat.

She does not thank him. Her upbringing demands it but the voices of her friends tell her that Logan does not deserve that, not for what he has all but forced her to accept.

 **Never give anyone control over you,** says Taako. **That’s the first rule to surviving. Never give up control of yourself.**

Lucretia swallows thickly and curls her fingers tight around the rough blanket, tight enough to turn her knuckles white, tight enough to hurt. _It’s just a year_ , she tells herself. _It’s just a year, and then I’m home._

Home is subjective, with the life they lead. But home has become the Starblaster—it has become a people, rather than a place. Home is Taako and Lup, it’s Barry and Magnus and Merle and Davenport. It’s them and it’s her and she would do anything to bring them back.

If that means surrendering her freedom, then so be it. As long as she is alive at the end of the year, this will all fade into another nightmare in the darkness of her familiar cabin, another whispered conversation with one or both of the twins over chamomile tea at midnight.

Lucretia is weak. But for them, she will have to be strong.

“So,” says Logan. “You got a name?"

She breathes in deep, and lets it out slowly. She forces her fingers to uncurl around the blanket, forces her shoulders to relax downwards from her ears. She sits up straight and sticks her chin in the air and does her best to look unafraid.

She looks him square in the eye and does not waver.

“Lucretia.”

 

* * *

 

 

Fisher is alone.

They swirl sadly through the water of their tank, crooning a soft song in hopes of a reply. They know what it is to be lonely; they are the last of their kind, after all. But with this strange, mismatched family from a world beyond the stars, they can sometimes forget their solitude. 

The ship has crashed. Fisher can see through the cracked glass of their tank that the place is in shambles, jagged metal peeling back from a hole in the wall to allow pale sunlight to filter through. The door to the room stands open to reveal the hallway outside, and wind whistles through the from another hole somewhere further along.

The family had fallen through one of these holes. Fisher had heard their distant screams, had felt their presences fade from the vicinity. They’d felt, too, the hurried magic of Lucretia’s shields; Fisher knows she’d tried to save them, just as they know that she failed.

But she had not disappeared. Her presence had been here, and then it had left. Someone had taken her. She’s alive, from what they can feel. There is no void where her presence should be, not like with the others. They’re dead, Fisher knows. They learned early on how to sense their deaths. 

So they know that Lucretia is alive, and that, like them, she is alone. Fisher is evidently not a creature of enough sentience for the constant resets to remove them, but neither are they so unintelligent that they cannot draw conclusions. And the conclusion they draw from this situation is as such: if Lucretia is alone, and if they are alone, then all they need is to find her and neither will be alone anymore.

But Fisher does not know where she is, or how to find her. They do not know what the world outside is like, though they suspect it is a cruel one. And unlike the family, they do not have the advantage of resetting at the end of each cycle. Fisher ages normally and will live only once, and if they are killed on this world then Lucretia truly will be all alone.

Fisher does not want that. They are smart enough to know they should not go looking for her.

And so they sit, and they sing, and they wait.

  
  


 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i want to continue this story but also multi-chapter fics take a lot of effort and idk if i'll have to motivation to do it if there's not interest so please let me know if you want more by either commenting or visiting me on [tumblr](https://thepensword.tumblr.com)


	2. month 1-2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucretia is alone, and then she is not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had no motivation and then suddenly i did have motivation and oh look here's another chapter i have a headache enjoy
> 
> Chapter Warnings: nightmares, blood, scars, mentions of neglectful/distant/controlling parenting

 

Lucretia wakes up.

For a moment, she just lies there, eyes shut, back flat to the thin pallet separating her from the packed dirt floor. She twists her fingers in the rough fabric of the blanket and breathes out her nightmares.

(Inky tendrils approaching, consuming, her friends screaming, she’s drowning, drowning, and then she’s gone—)

Lucretia exhales shakily and opens her eyes. Even now, a small part of her hopes foolishly that she will see her room on the Starblaster, that she will be home.

She doesn’t. She’s on the floor in the corner of Logan’s hut, staring up at the straw thatching that makes up the ceiling. It’s cold, just like it always is, and Lucretia wishes she had thought to grab the thick, soft socks Taako had gotten for her a few cycles back. The thought passes like a swallowed sob and she reflexively reaches for his hat, bunched up and held close beneath her blanket.

Lucretia does not want to get out of this poor excuse for a bed. She does not want to pull on the tattered brown coat Logan had given her in lieu of her red robe, comforting and warm but very much a target. She does not want to face this lonely, unforgiving world.

The flap of cloth that hangs over the door way is pushed aside and Logan sticks his head through. “Hey,” he says. “Get moving.” The lines of his face are soft but his eyes are like stone, hard and cold and completely devoid of compassion. It baffles Lucretia to compare him to Merle—they are both healers, technically, but Merle heals by his very presence, while Logan only continues to bring her pain.

The curtain swings shut.

Lucretia slips out of her blankets and stands slowly, feeling the ache of constant work and the cold of sleeping on the floor deep in her bones. She wonders distantly if she’ll ever shake the effects of this world. Even after everything resets, even if—when, she gets her family back, will the fear still linger in her veins? Will the despair haunt her nightmares?

It’s been two weeks. It feels so much longer than that. Lucretia thinks of the lonely year ahead of her and feels dread crawl slow and icy into her heart.

She can’t keep doing this. She’s going to have to escape, somehow.

How?

 **You can do anything you put your mind to, Lucretia,** says Davenport, hands tight on the Starblaster’s steering wheel. **As long as you don’t give up, you can achieve anything at all.**

“Lucretia,” calls Logan from outside, cold and firm. She snaps herself from the depths of her mind and ties her hair back with a strip of red cloth she’d torn from her robe. Her curls are dirty to the touch, filled with grime and sweat, and she wonders if she looked into a mirror, would they be brown?

Carefully folding Taako’s hat so that it is secure in the pocket of her coat, Lucretia steels herself and heads outside to face this cruel, gray world.

 

* * *

 

 

Three weeks in, Lucretia finishes her work early and slips away into the forest. It’s not to run away; she’s not brave enough to run away yet, but she needs to see the ship. She needs to assess the damage so she can figure out how to fix it. She needs to know if Fisher is—

A low-lying branch juts into her path and she doesn’t quite see it in time, instead plowing through it and nearly tripping as it scrapes across her shin. Lucretia bites back a cry, knowing she is not yet far enough from the village, and when she looks down she sees red as the shallow scrape begins to bleed sluggishly.

She hopes the wood did not contain toxins. She doesn’t have time to stop and treat it.

High above, the sky is as gray as ever, and it’s hard to say whether it’s from clouds or smoke. On rare occasions, fragments of blue appear on the flat ceiling, chinks in the blanket, but these occasions are very few and far between. Sometimes Lucretia will dream of the sun, but she thinks she’s beginning to forget the warm feel of it on her skin. (No sun is so very different from two suns. This world, like so many others, is so undoubtedly alien, and Lucretia feels sick at times without the nourishment from above. Vitamins, Merle had called them.)

It’ll be hard to see the Hunger when it comes. It’ll be impossible to find the Light, even if she does get the Starblaster working in time. _Good,_ thinks Lucretia bitterly. _Let them die_.

 **No one deserves the Hunger,** chides Magnus gently. **We don’t get to play judge, jury, and executioner.**

Lucretia thinks of the judges of this world and decides she doesn’t care.

The forest of black trees is unforgiving and seemingly never-ending. Each path through the brush looks like the rest and Lucretia has no real way to be sure she’s heading in the right direction, but she has no choice but to forge onwards. She doesn’t admit to herself that she is searching almost completely blindly.

The day stretches on. The sky is unchanging, the trees an endless monotony, this colorless world leeching the energy from Lucretia’s veins. She lets out a voiceless scream of frustration, air passing with little more than a whistle from rough vocal chords, and slumps against the craggy bark of a tree. This is pointless. Logan will soon discover she’s gone. She should head back, she should—

She hears a song.

It is beautiful, and faint, and achingly familiar. It carries on the stale breeze to land like a revelation on her ears and tears sprung unbidden to her eyes. Fisher.

Lucretia takes off running. Twigs snap beneath her feet but she takes no notice, caring only for the call of the voidfish’s voice, the melody that sounds like home. In it are Lup’s violin and Barry’s piano and Davenport’s tenor and Magnus’ boisterous bass and Merle’s off-key tones and Taako’s lilting elvish and Lucretia’s—

Lucretia hears the sound of her own voice in the harmonies of Fisher’s song and loses all sense of composure. She is gasping for breath around jagged sobs by the time she reaches the Starblaster.

It’s not a pretty sight.

The bow of the ship is almost completely crushed from its collision with the ground. The white metal of the deck is cracked and dented, the railing bent in places and snapped in others. As Lucretia stumbles closer, she spots the gaping hole in the side where the others had fallen through.

Fisher’s song pauses for just a moment and then grows louder, and there is a sound like water splashing before they appear, floating in the space of the hole. Lucretia lets out a muffled cry and runs towards them. They glow happily and wrap her up in their tendrils as soon as she is close enough, feeling through her hair and humming an elvish lullaby Lup had sung to her after they’d lost Magnus early on a few cycles back.

Lucretia hums it back to them and crumples just inside the hole. The walls of the Starblaster are around her again, even battered as they are, and Lucretia is so, so glad to be home.

She can’t stay. She knows she can’t stay. She doesn’t know how to fly the ship, not really, and anyway, it’s in no shape to fly. She needs to fix it, somehow, teach herself to pilot it.

Not now, though. The sun, hidden as it is by the gray of the sky, has gotten dangerously near to the horizon. Lucretia has to get back or else someone will notice she’s gone, and she doesn’t really want to know what will happen then. At least she knows where the ship is, now.

“I have to go, Fisher,” she tells them, and they sing a sad phrase. “I know. I’ll be back, I promise. Stay here.”

Fisher brushes their tendrils one last time through her hair before floating forlornly back to their tank, and Lucretia heads back to her dust-gray cage.

(Well, not immediately. She grabs three pairs of thick wool socks first.)

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a scar on her side.

It’s not that bad. It’s smooth, for the most part, but paler than the rest of her skin and puckered just a bit around the edges. Some metal from the ship had cut her, there, deep enough to bleed all over the shirt she’d been wearing.

She’d tried to wash the stains out of it, but the fabric was pale blue and now it is splattered with pale brown like rust. It’s not horribly unattractive, all things considering, like a terribly morbid tie-dye.

In any case, there’s enough dirt on it for it to not matter.

But the scar.

Logan had healed her, and healed her well. But not well enough to stop the scarring. That doesn’t really matter either, in the long run, Lucretia reflects. It’ll be gone at the start of the next year, anyway.

She likes to run her fingers over it. It feels a bit like an oath.

 _I’ll be gone at the start of the next year_ , it means. _You’re going to make it to the next year._

“I’m going to make it to the next year,” whispers Lucretia.

There’s a scar on her side and she’s going to live long enough to make it go away.

 

* * *

 

 

Lucretia wipes her dirty hands on her equally dirty skirt and straightens her spine. The work she does for Logan is as varied as it is grueling; she harvests vegetables, she runs errands, she patches the roof, she tends to animals, she searches for herbs, she organizes potions. Some tasks are easier than others, but the fact that each one is followed by the next means that the circles under her eyes have grown so deep that she worries they’ll be permanent.

It’s fine. She’s been tired in the past. She’ll manage.

Logan frowns at her as he passes by, stopping to watch her place another wrinkled carrot into her basket. “You look awful,” he says.

Lucretia doesn’t answer. Being polite was never part of the deal. (Her mother would scold her, say that politeness is _always_ part of the deal, but her mother is  sixty-five years dead, so what does it matter?)

Anyway, she already knows she looks awful. She hasn’t washed herself in almost a month beyond scrubbing at her face with a wet rag and she hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in...god, she can’t even remember. She’s had nightmares since even before this gods-forsaken world.

“Sleep more and maybe you’ll work hard enough to pay your debt early,” says Logan, and leaves her to it.

Lucretia yanks another carrot out of the ground with more force than is necessary. _Asshole._

 

* * *

 

 

“Do you ever miss home?”

Fisher twirls softly through the air and sings something quiet. Lucretia’s never been sure how much they understand and how much they don’t, but she thinks they can comprehend tone, at least. They must hear her nostalgia.

“I don’t,” she says. She hammers away at the wall, where she’s trying to secure a large sheet of metal from the robot world over the gaping hole. “Well, I do, but it’s complicated.”

Fisher brushes a tendril over her cheek and Lucretia sighs. She takes a moment to pound in more nails before continuing. She’s making good progress on fixing the ship—at least that’s one good thing to come out of her being trapped here. All the manual labor she’s been doing has made her stronger.

“Growing up was weird.” Another nail. “It wasn’t strictly bad, per se, but it wasn’t….the best. My parents were distant. They were rich and upper class and I had to be perfect. Me being perfect was more important to them than me being their daughter.”

Another nail. Another soft refrain from Fisher. They can probably sense the way her emotions are all twisted up inside her, knotted and tangled like string. She doesn’t really know why she’s telling them this now, except maybe for the fact that she hasn’t really told anyone this and also she hasn’t really told anyone anything since coming to this world.

Maybe she’s just lonely, but that’s nothing new. It’s just that she’s gotten used to having a family.

“It’s weird that way,” she says. “I should miss our homeworld, but this whole desperate flee from the Hunger has given me an actual family for the first time. I don’t have to be perfect around them. I just have to be me and that’s enough for them and—”

A droplet of water lands on her hand, and Lucretia’s stares at it in shock. She’s crying. When had she started crying?

Fisher hums something gentle and consoling and wraps tendrils around her shoulders. They dance and spin around her and sing and sing and help her sink to her knees slowly. God, she’s so lonely.

The funny thing is, she hasn’t had to be perfect in sixty-five years. But now she has to be even more than perfect. She has to be the strongest and the bravest and the smartest that she’s ever been, or everything ends. That’s not being dramatic. If she doesn’t make it out of here, everything ends, the Hunger wins, and that’s game over for all of existence.

That’s a heavy weight for anyone’s shoulders, and Lucretia is just eighteen, just eighty-three, just the quiet archivist on an impossible mission, just a girl all alone in a desolate, unforgiving world.

 

* * *

 

 

Logan lives in what one might call a village, if one is being particularly generous. The people of this world are desperate and selfish and have almost nothing, but people are largely social creatures and so they group together into desperate and selfish communities. The houses are small, the land poor, the people unfriendly and mistrustful and strangely worshiping of the judges in the shining city above them, but they are still people and they still behave accordingly.

There’s a girl named Ida.

Ida is beautiful. She has big brown eyes and stick-straight hair and her lashes curl thick and dark away from her lids. She smiles like moonlight and doesn’t say cruel things to Lucretia the way everyone else does, if they decide to acknowledge her existence at all.

Lucretia might be a little bit in love. This is a problem. She’ll only be here for a year.

This is how it starts:

 

* * *

 

It’s been five weeks. Lucretia’s whole body feels like one massive sore muscle, and the calluses on her hands have grown calluses of their own. The hole in the Starblaster is patched up and the broken bits of the deck railing mostly cleared away, but it won’t fly. The problem is the bond engine. It runs on the love shared between its crew, but they’re all dead except for Lucretia. The bonds are still there, of course, but weakened considerably, and so the Starblaster won’t fly.

She’s tried. She failed. She cried about it and went back to Logan’s with a sick feeling in her stomach.

Lucretia’s tired and frustrated and lonely and Logan’s goat got out again and ate all the potato seedlings that just started growing and now she can’t get it back in its pen and the weight of the world is so heavy that Lucretia crumples to the ground and buries her head in her hands and cries.

It’s too much. It’s all too much. She’s just one person. She can’t do this all alone.

“Hey,” says a voice, all kind and gentle, and for a moment Lucretia thinks she’s hallucinating again and it’s Magnus or Lup or Barry or Merle or Taako or Davenport come again to haunt her, but it doesn’t echo or fade away on the breeze. “Are you alright?”

Lucretia looks up.

The girl standing there is at that young age between teenager and woman, that same awkward place Lucretia’s been stuck in for sixty-five years, except she wears it with such confidence that you wouldn’t be able to tell if you weren’t also living it. She’s wearing a faded blue scarf around her neck. One hand is resting on her hip. The other is supporting the goat she’s got tucked under her arm.

Logan’s goat. She’s holding Logan’s goat, and smiling down at Lucretia like a vision.

“Um,” says Lucretia. She climbs to her feet and scrubs the tears away from her cheeks, suddenly embarrassed now that someone’s decided to notice her.

“I’m Ida,” says the girls. There’s a few solitary freckles dotted across her cheeks like constellations. “Is this your goat?”

“Yes,” says Lucretia. Why is her tongue so heavy in her mouth? “No. I mean, it’s Logan’s. I’m just, uh. Watching it.”

Ida laughs. It’s a lovely sound, and Lucretia has to pause because she can’t quite remember the last time she heard someone laughing. “You’re a funny one,” says Ida. “You’re a stranger ‘round these parts, aren’t you?”

Lucretia nods because she’s not sure she could make the words work even if she wanted to.

“What’s your name, stranger?”

She swallows. Brushes the dirt from her knees. Smooths a hand through her knotted curls.

“I’m Lucretia.”

 

* * *

 

Somehow, the days become a little bit more bearable. The routine hasn’t changed much: wake up early, work herself to the point of collapse, sneak away to the Starblaster and work herself some more, sneak back late and don’t sleep much for fear of nightmares.

But now, Ida plans her day so that she’ll walk past the vegetable patch while Lucretia’s working. She’ll smile, and Lucretia will smile back, and if Logan’s not nearby she’ll call out, “Hi, Stranger!” and laugh when Lucretia blushes.

It’s a little bit scary and a little bit wonderful, and it cannot possibly come to anything because the Hunger is coming to this world in a year, but Lucretia is tired and alone and she doesn’t care right now.

It escalates.

She stops sneaking away to the Starblaster so often. There’s nothing she can do anymore, anyway, not until she figures out how to get the bond engine going, so there’s no point except to sit in her empty home and sing quietly back and forth with Fisher. She still goes, just not as often. Instead, she sneaks off into the woods and waits there for Ida.

Ida always comes. Lucretia likes the consistency of that.

At first, they just talk. Ida tells her about her family. She’s the oldest of five siblings, her mother is dead; “It’s like I’m a mother now,” she laughs, and Lucretia laughs with her. “At least I’m never alone.”

Sometimes, Lucretia will tell her about her own family. “We’re unconventional, for certain,” she says. She talks about Magnus’ recklessness and the twins’ cooking and horrible tone Merle uses to talk to plants. “It’s like he seduces them,” she giggles. She can’t remember the last time she giggled. “It’s _gross_.”

Ida throws her head back and laughs and laughs and laughs. “They sound wonderful,” she says at last, when she’s managed to catch her breath again.

“They are,” says Lucretia, and looks up, searching for the stars.

There’s a long stretch of silence between them. It’s peaceful, all warm and comfortable like a blanket, but there’s a strange current of electricity hanging just below the surface.

Ida is watching her.

“What?” says Lucretia.

“Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful?”

 

* * *

 

They kiss for the first time that night. It tastes like dirt and charcoal, like the thick air of this world. It tastes like something bright in the darkness. It tastes like youth and hope and not being alone.

Lucretia knows she can’t have this. She also knows she wants it. And she shouldn’t, she really shouldn’t, but she is young and desperate and sometimes she is foolish.

It is a pointless romance, and soon it will end.

Lucretia falls regardless.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> leave me alone im gay and this is my story and i can do whatever i want 
> 
>  
> 
> [my tumblr](https://thepensword.tumblr.com)
> 
>  


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